Page 42 of Scars Run Deep

Asher: She’s excited about it.

Jonah: And you don’t want to rain on her parade. Sweet of you.

Asher: Watch yourself.

Jonah: How about I don’t and you make me choke on your cock later?

Asher: We both know that’s all pleasure for you.

Jonah: Damn fucking straight.

When he didn’t reply, my fingers hovered over my phone for a few seconds, before I texted back what I’d been on the fence about.

Jonah: You think she’s too excited about this?

Asher: Perhaps.

Jonah: And?

Asher: And we all bear scars. Doesn’t mean we can’t function in spite of them. Sometimes, because of them, said scars providing the impetus we need to step it up.

Of course, he was of the opinion that pain made us stronger.

I was too.

Kill, not so much. He was in the camp of it wearing us down and taking its toll.

It was a question of different experiences.

The thing with Aurora was that she straddled both.

While that was good on one hand, on the other it meant conflict. And when you were conflicted, that invited weakness.

Something Asher wouldn’t allow when we entered into this war.

Fuck. He’d root it out in her, make her pick a lane.

Despite his promises to Kill, he’d have to do it, to protect her as much as us.

The safer route for her would be to embrace the dark and twisted. The other route involved holding back by sticking to the right side of things, to not making moral compromises. Good people did that, those who let their humanity get in the way. And those types were cut down like nothing by Carson and the Head Infidels. Monsters like me and Asher, we had no limits, we didn’t stop or hold back for some altruistic sense of morality and goodness.

We did what had to be done.

If he did that with this issue, though, it risked breaking the four of us, fracturing what had developed between us, the close knit unit that we’d become with Aurora at the epicenter.

Jonah: She’s not us.

I braced myself as soon as I sent the text. I didn’t go against him, not even in the slightest of ways. I was always on his side.

I couldn’t imagine this going over well.

It could very well activate his extreme paranoia, thinking with just this one thing that I was pulling away, and that he’d have to call my longtime allegiance into question.

Yeah, when it came to that paranoia of his, Asher could honestly go from zero to a thousand in the blink of an eye.

Asher: No, she’s not.

Well, that had been… easy.

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